Table of Contents

In This Article:

With the positive impact of the promised recovery taking longer than expected to trickle through to all sectors of South Africa’s economy, HR directors are still under huge pressure to curb salary and wage bills, while building managers and employees for tomorrow. Ruwayne Kock takes a look at how we can improve productivity and retain valued people in the current reality.

by Ruwayne Kock

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ruwayne Kock is a shareholder at The Human Resource Practice, where he is the head of the consulting service line. As a registered industrial psychologist, his consulting experience encompasses strategic HR management; leadership; employee engagement; talent management; organisational design; strategic learning and development; organisation development; and change management across a range of industry sectors. He has also published articles online in local and international journals. Ruwayne is a sought-after conference presenter in the people management field.

Many companies’ initial reaction to the recession was fairly predictable: they cut costs by reducing the number of employees, overheads and what they deemed as unnecessary expenses in the hope that this would help them weather the economic storm and outperform their competitors.

However, with economists predicting that we’ll be buffeted by fierce trading conditions for longer than originally anticipated, these same companies will need to seek out ways to sustain their business performance. After all, they have reached that point where retrenching more employees, or slashing other expenses, will mean that they will be left with skeleton resources and those who remain will not have the means, nor the will to produce the required results.

One way of improving the bottom line without decreasing overheads and expenses is to improve performance. This is where employee engagement has emerged as an important strategy.

The importance of employee engagementThe research conducted by The Human Resource Practice on employee engagement in 2009 showed that just under half (47%) of the respondents stated that they were ready for a new job at a new level; and 17% said they were ready for a new job at the same level. A phenomenal 64% were thus looking for new horizons within and outside the company. With a slow upturn of the economy and limitations on job mobility, this may mean that employees are becoming more despondent and even more unproductive in their jobs. By comparison, the Towers Perrin Global Workforce Report (2008) found that 40% of engaged employees are “passive job seekers” and half of the disengaged have no plans to leave or are not even looking. This research supports that employers face the danger of losing their valued employees, while retaining the non-contributing people.

This is an important finding because retaining valued employees is also a strategy for survival in a recession, as it costs a great deal in money and time to advertise for replacements, interview prospective employees and train them once they come on board. Hence, The Human Resource Practice is planning to repeat the national employee engagement survey in 2010 to better understand this employee engagement phenomenon within the South African context; and how to improve productivity and retention in the current reality.